Friday Family Movie Night Review: ParaNorman

Every Friday night is movie night at our house. Pizza and a movie in the living room. I don’t know when or why exactly we came up with this, but we like it (most of the time) and it works. Tonight we rented ParaNorman, which I thought might be a doable movie, but I was highly disappointed.

First of all, with this movie having been rated PG, I thought that it’s scariness would be limited to that of, you know, something more like Monsters, Inc. scary. Boy was I wrong. Twenty minutes into the movie, we had to turn it off, because Rapunzel and Princess Anna were too scared. (Luckily, I convinced them not to watch Care Bears: The Movie instead.) I mean, we were okay for a little while, but the beginning of the movie shows a crazy homeless man swallowing a bottle of pills. A little further into the movie (because Wendy and Cinderella did finish later), several sexual innuendos appear, which was also surprising. And to top it off, the ghost of the grandmother blatantly, straight-out says “Jack-a**”. That’s when I knew for sure we were done with it for the little ones.

Thankfully Rapunzel is pretty good about asking about a word before she says it.

If I had to pull out something good about this movie, I’d say it teaches us that bullying is not acceptable and that empathy is the best way to handle difficult people.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend it. At least not for young children. Keep it for children probably 10+, who you know won’t end up with nightmares and won’t repeat the language.